Obama volunteers himself as a commencement speaker for NYC women’s college

posted at 7:05 pm on March 6, 2012 by Tina Korbe

Would the president please quit pandering to liberal women? It might work, but it doesn’t become him. In a follow-up to his much-covered outreach to Sandra Fluke, Barack Obama invited himself to speak at the all-women Barnard College’s commencement address (h/t Doug Powers):

Word of Mr. Obama’s appearance at Barnard, a 123-year-old women’s college in New York City, comes as the White House and Democrats have seized on Republican attempts to block a requirement for contraception coverage in the new health care law, saying it amounts to a “war on women.”

Democrats believe the issue could be an effective rallying point with women voters in a presidential election year, and the decision to appear at the prestigious women’s school could provide a high-profile forum for the president on that front.

An Obama administration official confirmed on Friday that the White House had called Barnard to offer the president as the commencement speaker.

Here’s the best part: Obama’s ousting Jill Abramson, first female EIC of The New York Times, who was originally tapped to deliver the address. If he’s so keen to promote liberal women’s issues, why steal the opportunity from Ms. Abramson?

Identity politics perpetuate the very problems they purport to solve; activists for “women’s issues” reduce women to their womanhood, as though all their political concerns proceed from their gender. But if men and women are no different, shouldn’t “men’s issues” and “women’s issues” be identical?

Truth is, men and women are different and the chief, impossible-to-be-obliterated difference is that women bear babies while men cannot. The use of contraception is any feminist’s best attempt to eliminate that difference, but, always, a woman’s need for contraception to avoid pregnancy belies it. Make no mistake, for feminists, if not necessarily for the administration, the contraception mandate would be the final triumph in a generations-old war on fertility. As James Taranto writes:

“Family planning is good for families,” [WaPo columnist Lisa Miller] insists, ignoring the sharp rise in divorce and illegitimacy since 1960, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the pill for contraceptive use. In fairness, maybe she means to make a more modest claim–that for the subset of the population who have been able to form and sustain marriages despite the social dislocations of the past half-century, birth control has on balance been beneficial.

But in any case, why does it so bother Miller that the Romneys, Santorums and Pauls (and also the Palins, whom she mentions in another paragraph) made the choice to have large families? If she cared about choice, she would recognize it’s none of her business. But contemporary feminism does not actually value choice, except as a means to an ideological end, which is the obliteration of differences between the sexes. The biggest such difference consists in the distinct and disparate demands that reproduction makes on women. Thus in order to equalize the sexes, it is necessary to discourage fertility. Implicit in contemporary feminism is a normative judgment that having children is bad.

If this were made explicit, of course, the whole project would fall apart. Feminism is politically unviable without the support of at least a substantial minority of women, and women (or at least most women) do have a maternal instinct. So feminism has to wage its war against fertility covertly, rationalizing it in terms of other goals.

Other goals — like “women’s health.”

It’s into this longstanding passion against the ever-remaining evidence of sexual difference that Obama has tapped with his contraception mandate — and he knows it. The more Obama can stoke the misimpression that Republicans want to ban contraception, the more liberal and undecided women will rally to him.

Conservatives object to the contraception mandate for reasons that have nothing to do with sex, contraception or fertility — but liberals fight for it for reasons that have everything to do with sex, contraception and fertility.

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So PBHO calls up the college and says “Hey, I’ll be over for your commencement on Friday night”, and no one thinks to say no, or that someone else is already slated to speak? Pompous jackwagon sullies the office every day he occupies it.

An MSM-spin-worthy headline, Ms Korbe. The Obamunists hip-checked the first woman CEO of the NYT in 100yrs right into the roadside ditch, so they could steal the commencement bully pulpit at Barnyard [sic].

Talk about being rude, this takes the cake. I am so important that I will be your speaker. His manners are very shocking as well as the people who advise him and with the vocabulary from the streets. Yet the media gives him a pass every time not like the medias constant bickering of Bush’s pronouncing of nuclear.

Would it be crass to suggest that — unlike his insistence that at any Catholic institution from which he delivers an address, all overt signs of religiosity be covered up — here, he will insist that all stops be pulled in order to convey the message that he is Barack the Magnificent, the Lord High Protector of Contraception and All-Wise Unburdener of Burdens?

To wit: a backdrop of his signature “O” (ripped off from the Stones’ “Hot Licks” cover art) created using multicolored birth control pills and their cases, while, overhead, tasteful mobiles of IUDs, twist serenely in the breeze. Arrayed behind him: his Commissariat of Contraception — Contraceptress Kathleen and the heads of NOW, NARAL, PP and the like — and, to top it all off (so to speak), he’d don a diaphragm as a skull cap.

Yeah, it would be crass… but he’s anything but subtle, so I’m willing to bet at least one of these will occur.

This is the most incompetent/unqualified president in history. The only things he has going for him is racial hatred and class envy. Now he will try to interject gender warfare to the equation to divide the country as much as possible. If he runs on his record, he knows he has no chance.

The key phrase is that the women libbers belive that their view is the only one that is beneficial to the entire world. With that belief they can readily ignore different opinions based on different beliefs.

He can arrive and shower birth control pills upon the crowd and the women will be so entralled with his awesomeness!

I’m certain somewhere in some Alinsky style manual it will state that “women are hysterical creatures and it is wise to use their fits of hysterics to promote a cause or to create a diversion away from items that moderate citizens may find unsettling.”

How well trained are women now that it just takes the subject of “reproductive health” to whip up the hysteria. Dog trainers would love to have as much success.